As of March 2023[update] members included Chaz Jankel (guitar and keyboards), Nathan King (bass), Mick Gallagher (keyboards and piano), John Turnbull (vocals and guitar), John Roberts (drums), and Mike Bennett (lead vocals).

In 1974, Radio Caroline's Ronan O'Rahilly set up the pop group The Loving Awareness Band, comprising John Turnbull (guitar) and Mick Gallagher (keyboards), both formerly of 1960s psychedelic rock band Skip Bifferty, with the session musicians Norman Watt-Roy (bass) and Charley Charles (born Hugh Glenn Mortimer Charles, Guyana 1945) (drums).

The Loving Awareness Band broke up in 1977 and Watt-Roy and Charles joined a new band being formed by Ian Dury, who had begun writing songs with pianist and guitarist Chaz Jankel (the brother of noted music video, TV, commercial and film director Annabel Jankel).

With Jankel fashioning Dury's lyrics into number of songs, the two began recording with Charles, Watt-Roy, Gallagher, Turnbull and former Kilburn and the High Roads saxophonist Davey Payne.

The tune is based on part of Charlie Haden's bass solo on "Ramblin'" on Ornette Coleman's 1959 album Change of the Century.

The band's second album, Do It Yourself, was released in June 1979 in a Barney Bubbles-designed sleeve of which there were over a dozen variations, all based on samples from the Crown wallpaper catalogue.

Bubbles also designed the Blockhead logo,[3] which received international acclaim and which continues to be used by the band as, for example, on their Live in Colchester 2004 DVD.

The single and its accompanying music video featured a Davey Payne sax solo with dual saxophones, in evident homage to jazz saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who had made this his trademark technique.

Jankel left the band temporarily and relocated to the U.S. after the release of "What A Waste" (his organ part on that single was overdubbed later) but he subsequently returned to the UK and began touring sporadically with the Blockheads, eventually returning to the group full-time for the recording of "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick"; according to Mick Gallagher, the band recorded 28 takes of the song but eventually settled on the second take for the single release.

Partly due to personality clashes with Dury,[1] Jankel quit the group again in 1980, after the recording of the Do It Yourself LP, and he returned to the U.S. to concentrate on his solo career.

The group worked solidly over the 18 months between the release of "Rhythm Stick" and their next single, "Reasons to Be Cheerful", which returned them to the charts, making the UK Top 10.

Choosing to work with a new group of young musicians which he named The Music Students, he recorded the album Four Thousand Weeks' Holiday.

In December 1990, augmented by Merlin Rhys-Jones on guitar and Will Parnell on percussion, they recorded the live album Warts & Audience at the Brixton Academy.

Dury and Curve singer Toni Halliday shared vocals on a cover of the Blockheads' track "What a Waste".

The promotional video for the album, featuring the song "Greed", was directed and photographed by cinematographer Stuart Harris and included cameo appearances by Martin Freeman, Toby Jones and Rowland Rivron.

[18] In 2015, Free Seed Films launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £50,000 in order to fund a documentary film, Beyond the Call of Dury, about the careers of the four original members of the band (Gallagher, Jankel, Turnbull and Watt-Roy), from their early days in the 1960s, including their work with Dury, until the present.

Although the single was banned by the BBC, a number of Radio 1 disc jockeys, including Annie Nightingale and John Peel, continued to promote the record by playing the mildly salacious B-side "Razzle In My Pocket".

[citation needed] Narrated by a bragging bricklayer from Billericay, the song is filled with name-checks for places in Essex and features a number of suggestive rhymes: Each verse tells a different short story, relating one of Dickie's sexual conquests in southeastern England, while the choruses see him insisting he is a caring, conscientious lover and "not a thickie", even giving the names of two girls ("a pair of squeaky chickies") as referees who would attest to this.

Dury claimed, in a 1984 interview with Penthouse magazine that, while not condemning 9-to-5 jobs, he had written the song to make people question their lives, echoing the sentiments of his earlier single "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll".

The song's verses list a number of occupations that the narrator could have taken, including driver, poet, teacher and soldier, even an inmate in a long-term institution and the ticket man at Fulham Broadway tube station.

The chorus reveals that instead he chose to "play the fool in a six-piece band", highlighting some of its disadvantages, particularly loneliness, before deciding that "rock 'n' roll don't mind".